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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ResearchSPace - Bath Spa University !∀ # ∃%& ∋(& ∀∃ & )(∗)∃&∃∋(& %∃ ∃+,∃ −./0. !1 .234.4−45 ∗&∃%& Chapter 6 Constraint, Collaboration and Creativity in Popular Songwriting Teams Joe Bennett Popular music has at its economic, musical and cultural centre a single item of intellectual property – the pop song. Over many decades of consumption, popular song has established a set of musical and literary constraints within which creativity operates. These constraints are arrived at by economic and democratic means, being rooted in the quasi-evolutionary process of natural selection engendered by commercial markets, most easily demonstrable through ‘the charts’. In popular music, as in any art form, new artists can and do challenge established creative constraints, but what is perhaps remarkable about western popular song is how little the core structural characteristics of mainstream songs have deviated from some of the norms established in the early to mid twentieth century, despite the rapid technological, cultural and social change that drives the popular music industry. The process of creating popular song differs significantly from that for the majority of instrumental art music in two important respects: firstly, it is a partly literary act, songs having lyrics; secondly, it is extremely common for the composition to be co-written. Historically, around half of US and UK ‘hits’ are written by collaborative teams, most commonly comprising two individuals.1 At the time of writing (late 2010), current industry practice in the UK is for the majority of pop singles to be written collaboratively, with very few contemporaneous top 10 hits being written by individuals.2 This chapter focuses on the collaborative processes used by songwriting teams within the constraints of song form, and particularly on the ‘negotiated creativity’ that is, I contend, a prerequisite for the successful function of most songwriting teams. Before we address the central question of how songs are written collaboratively, we must identify the nature of the created object itself, and ask at a musically specific level ‘what is a song?’ Defining the term appears simple enough: Chambers3 defines ‘song’ as ‘a set of words, short poem, etc to 1 Terry F. Pettijohn II and Shujaat F. Ahmed, ‘Songwriting; loafing or creative collaboration?: A comparison of individual and team written billboard hits in the USA’, Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, 7/1 (2010), 2. 2 PRS for Music, Database search results, http://www.prsformusic.co.uk (2010). 3 Chambers, Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (London, 1996), http://www.cham bersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chref.py/main?query=song&title=21st. 140 THE ACT OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION be sung, usually with accompanying music’. However, even if we accept the broad classification that the word means simply ‘that which is sung’ (excluding the small but significant number of instrumental hits that Anglo-American popular music has produced since the 1950s), we need to locate the studied object among many sub-genres, including hymn, lieder, opera, pop song, folk song and children’s songs. This chapter focuses on the Anglo-American commercial mainstream popular song since the 1950s, and more specifically on the ‘single’, that is, a musical/ literary work intended to be appreciated4 in isolation, not as part of a long- duration listener experience such as a musical theatre show, opera or concept album. There are several reasons for this choice. Firstly, selecting songs intended for commercial consumption increases the likelihood that the composer/s will be trying actively to engage the listener, so creative decisions will share this common incentive.5 This contrasts with more ‘pure’ artistic self-expression in (typically amateur) songwriting, where creative goals may be conflicting, highly personal or nebulous. Secondly, commercial popular song, despite its cultural ubiquity, has had little study applied to the process of its creation. Previous research studies6 have focused on instrumental composition rather than exclusively on songwriting, often in an educational setting, where participants are, by definition, amateur composers. These individuals may therefore have a different set of creative imperatives and constraints from songwriters who are incentivised to create a ‘hit’, or at least a song that will appeal to a significant numbers of listeners. Thirdly, commercial popular song has an attendant measure of its effectiveness in the form of popular music charts. Originally these were calculated through sales of sheet music, then subsequently by physical sales of singles, and now by downloads or online streams; the music ‘chart’ is a powerful metric when defining trends in song, covering as it does some 80 or more years of Anglo-American hits. Apart from (helpfully) ranking the most successful songs in order of listener popularity, the practice of using charts as a metric for what constitutes song norms may mediate some of the inevitable subjectivity of musical taste among individuals regarding what makes a ‘good song’. Fourthly, songwriters by definition need to write lyrics; in copyright terms, a lyric is usually considered to be a literary work representing 50 per cent of the song. On a pragmatic level, studying the process of collaborative lyric-writing provides text- 4 Given that singles are usually intended for purchase, perhaps ‘consumed’ would be a better word. 5 Greg Clydesdale, ‘Creativity and competition: The Beatles’, Creativity Research Journal, 18/2 (April 2006), 129. 6 John Kratus, ‘A time analysis of the compositional processes used by children ages 7 to 11’, Journal of Research in Music Education, 37/1 (1989), 5. Pamela Burnard and Betty Anne Younker, ‘Mapping pathways: Fostering creativity in composition’, Music Education Research, 4/2 (2002), 245–61. Jeanne Bamberger, ‘The development of intuitive musical understanding: A natural experiment’, Psychology of Music, 31/1 (January 2003), 7–36. CONSTRAINT, COLLABoration AND CreatiVITY 141 based observational data that are considerably easier to track than the complex music-only decision-making pathways identified by Burnard and Younker.7 I contend that the popular song is defined – artistically and musically – by the market forces that perpetuate its survival. This is not commercial cynicism, but rather an extension of the Darwinian model applied by Csikszentmihalyi8 to all forms of creativity. In Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘systems model’, a creator creates new work that is validated by a ‘field’ of experts. If validated, it goes on to join the ‘domain’ of prior works, which in turn will influence existing and future creators. This definition of creativity (that a work must not only be original but also must be an influence on other creators) has rather a high threshold, much higher perhaps than the simple musical/literary uniqueness required to define a popular song as ‘original’ in copyright terms. Boden distinguishes between creativity that is original to its creator and creativity that is globally original: [We should] make a distinction between “psychological” creativity and “historical” creativity (P-creativity and H-creativity, for short). P-creativity involves coming up with a surprising, valuable idea that’s new to the person who comes up with it. It doesn’t matter how many people have had that idea before. But if a new idea is H-creative, that means that (so far as we know) no one else has had it before: it has arisen for the first time in human history. Clearly, H-creativity is a special case of P-creativity. […] But for someone who is trying to understand the psychology of creativity, it’s P-creativity that’s crucial. Never mind who thought of the idea first: how didthat person manage to come up with it, given that they had never thought of it before?9 If we apply Csikszentmihalyi’s definition more loosely, and allow for the ‘domain’ of work to include all popular music that is released,10 then all original songs are creative (and in Boden’s terms, arguably always H-creative). Thus, case studies do not necessarily need to beget hits in order to provide useful information about 7 Considering that several of Burnard and Younker’s observational subjects were songwriters, it is notable that their research does not substantially address lyric creation. This may be due to the authors’ stated intent to study ‘composers’, but it does perhaps demonstrate that lyric writing is considered by some to be an insignificant part of the songwriter’s creative process, despite its apparent equal value to the composition (at least in copyright terms). 8 Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity’. In: The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge, 1988), 325–39. 9 Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd edn (Abingdon Routledge, 2004), 2. 10 By ‘released’ I mean that someone has spent time and money on preparing the song for consumption, typically through recording and distributing it, implicitly on the basis of a (usually economic) return. This usefully filters out beginner songwriters who may not have achieved sufficient skills or experience to provide helpful interview or study subjects. 142 THE ACT OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION collaborative songwriting as long as any work/process being studied is undertaken by experienced songwriters who understand ‘song craft’. To illustrate the evolution of creative constraints (within which both H- and P-creativity can exist), let us analyse the time-duration of hit single recordings, and compare track length over several decades, using the top 10 best-selling singles in the UK from the five decades from 1960 to 2000.11 The longest duration of these is Bryan Adams’s Everything I Do (I Do For You), at 6 minutes and 33 seconds (6:33); the shortest is The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love at 2:13. The mean average track length per decade varies from 2:43 (1960s) to 4:07 (1990s).